Lower Classy
Netflix · 2017 · 66 min
A sharp, personal hour about growing up poor in South Texas.
Cristela Alonzo begins her first Netflix special with a joke about wanting to break the glass ceiling but also wanting to clean it. That balance between soaring ambition and working-class reality sets the tone for an hour recorded at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre in San Antonio. Alonzo, who had recently seen her self-titled ABC sitcom canceled, uses the stage to talk about the economic and cultural realities of growing up poor in South Texas as a first-generation American.\n\nThe set leans heavily on cultural observation and political reality, arriving just after the 2016 election. She tackles the absurdity of the proposed border wall by suggesting immigrants would just dig tunnels, critiques white girls wearing cornrows, and tells a story about her family’s confusion over an expensive Bloomingdale’s purse. The show balances these lighter, physical bits with a vulnerable tribute to her late mother. Alonzo shifts the audience from genuine sadness back to laughter quickly, showing an ability to ground her material in actual grief without losing the room.
The set list
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Donald Trump's pledge to build a wall along the US-Mexico border
Jokes that Trump's wall will turn border crossers into elite athletes competing in an immigrant triathlon where first prize is freedom.
-
Pre-teen obsession with New Kids on the Block
Recalls fantasizing about being their tour bus maid because cleaning was the only career she saw Latina women around her perform.
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Mother's fear of Girl Scouts
Explains that her undocumented mother hid from Girl Scouts selling cookies thinking they were Border Patrol agents in training.
-
Expensive healthy food versus fast food and her father's absence
Jokes that the McRib came back more times than her dad, waving at the camera in case he is watching.
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Nostalgia for the 'good old days'
Notes that only white people express nostalgia for the past, asking when brown people ever had 'good old days'.
-
Shopping at Bloomingdale's
Delights in having a sales clerk elaborately gift-wrap an expensive purse because the employee assumed she could not afford it.
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A near-final encounter with her terminally ill mother
Balances profound, teary-eyed emotional grief with sharp punchlines that quickly erupt into audience laughter and applause.
How it plays
- Tone
- Irreverent, thought-provoking, personal, and poignant.
- On stage
- Irrepressible, self-deprecating, witty, sly, and infectious personal storyteller.
- Pace
- Shifts effortlessly between emotional extremes, moving the room from tearful silence to explosive laughter, occasionally lingering on punchlines to prolong audience reactions.
- About
- Latino stereotypes and race relations, Poverty and class differences, Immigrant family experience, Mother's tough-love parenting, 2016 presidential election politics and border wall rhetoric
What the critics said
Praised as funny, intelligent, and thought-provoking; critics highlighted her ability to tackle heavy topics like class, racism, and grief without relying on stereotypes or feeling heavy-handed.
In the room: Rapt, emotionally moved to tears, and erupting into bursts of laughter and applause.
Backstory
Taped in August 2016 during the contentious 2016 presidential election cycle, drawing directly from Alonzo's upbringing in poverty as a first-generation Mexican-American raised by a single mother near the Texas-Mexico border.
Details
- Released
- Runtime
- 66 min
- Where
- Netflix
- Director
- Marcus Raboy
- Topics
- Before
- The Half Hour (2013)
- After
- Middle Classy (2022)
More from Cristela Alonzo
-
Upper Classy
Netflix
-
Middle Classy
Netflix
-
The Half Hour
Comedy Central
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